


Wolfsong

by jspringsteen



Series: The Company of Wolves [2]
Category: Sicario (2015), Sicario (Movies), Sicario 2 (2018), Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 21:34:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21327025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jspringsteen/pseuds/jspringsteen
Summary: She wants to ask him what he's not telling her, what she can only guess at; what it was like lying there, powerless, drifting in and out of the darkness upon sensations he could neither prevent nor control. Which visions he saw. What she looked like in them. She knows it's useless to prod him for a detailed description; his eyes say it all. "You came for me."Alejandro has been shot and left for dead in the desert. He turns to the only person he knows will help him.My long-delayed sequel to First blood (https://archiveofourown.org/works/15445113)
Relationships: Alejandro Gillick & Kate Macer, Alejandro Gillick/Kate Macer
Series: The Company of Wolves [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1537486
Comments: 15
Kudos: 56





	Wolfsong

_“Oh don't leave me on my own_  
_Left me standing all alone_  
_Cut me down to size so I can fit inside_  
_Lies that will divide us both in time_

Beck, _Blue Moon_

_“That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition._

Angela Carter, _The Company of Wolves_

*

**I**

Frosty leaves crunch under her feet as she walks on the snowy path, crisscrossed by the cuneiform tracks of hares and deer. Great pines brush her shoulders with their shaggy branches, as if trying to entangle her, and close behind her like a pair of jaws. She transfers her bag from one hand to the other; inside is a bottle of wine, frozen lasagna, garlic bread, and chocolate pudding—her go-to comfort meal. She hears the freezing howl of a wolf in the distance, but it doesn’t scare her. There’s a gun tucked between the packs of garlic bread.

She is on the alert, though. At the first rustle of twigs her practiced hand is on her weapon, but she breathes a sigh of relief when she sees Alejandro step onto the path.

“Hi,” he says. “Where are you off to?”

“I’m on my way home,” she tells him. She’s not surprised to see him here, and he offers to walk with her. He looks younger than she remembers; friendly, relaxed, even, and she feels secretly pleased that he wants to accompany her.

After they’ve walked for about ten minutes, he says, “I know a shortcut. If we cut through the trees here, we’ll save a quarter of an hour.” He’s already taken a few steps towards the tree line; Kate stops, and purses her lips in doubt. She’s never taken a shortcut before; all the trees look the same to her, and she knows she’ll be lost instantly if she veers off the path.

“No, let’s just keep walking. Fifteen minutes isn’t that much, anyway.”

He cocks his head, and now a more mischievous glint is in his eye. “Wanna bet? Whoever gets there first?”

“Alright. What do you wanna bet?” He’s back at her side in the blink of an eye, but his smile is just as friendly as before. “If I get there first, you’ll let me share your dinner.”

She looks down at her bag, and smiles. _That wouldn’t be so bad._

“Okay.”

“Let me carry the bag. It looks heavy.” He reaches for it, and takes it from her before she can protest. Her gun is in there, but—she’ll be fine, she reasons, as long as she sticks to the path.

She smiles and waves him on. “See you later.” He’s off among the trees in a flash, and she continues to walk along the winding path—perhaps a little more slowly than before, because as much as she loves her frozen lasagna, the idea of having dinner with Alejandro is even more appealing.

It’s beginning to get dark as she reaches the house. She sees the windows lit up with the glow of the fireplace, and hurries to the door. Grateful for the heat, and feeling a flame of a different kind burning under her skin, she looks around. He’s laid the table, and emerges from the kitchen holding two glasses of wine.

“Congratulations,” she says, shyly. She takes the glass from him and sips it while he bolts the door. When she turns around he’s very close again, his eyes like cinders, seeming to shine with an interior light. It almost takes her breath away, and she wants her gun—she sees it lying on the table—but she doesn’t dare reach for it, pinned down by his hypnotic gaze.

“What big eyes you have.”

“All the better to see you with.”

He sips his wine, but curiously enough, it leaves his mouth stained dark-red; when he smiles, his teeth are red, too. She looks down into her own glass; the wine is much more syrupy than she’d previously noticed. She takes a sip, and it’s not wine at all—it’s blood.

She gasps, and drops the glass; it shatters at her feet. When she looks up again, she sees only the yellow eyes and slavering jaws of a wolf, coming in closer until he swallows her in one bite.

**II**

She wakes up crying.

The yellow digits on her alarm clock show 5:23 a.m. Teeth chattering—the heat doesn’t turn on until six—she burrows underneath her covers, closes her eyes, and wishes she could stay there indefinitely.

Barely 24 hours since her reunion with Alejandro, and her nightmares have returned full force. Her brain and her body seem to have slotted into their default states from two years ago, so she curls up, closes her eyes, and tries hard to breathe evenly. 

“God almighty, Kate, I fucking warned you about this – what did you think was going to happen?” Reggie’s voice, and the last words he said to her—shouted, actually—when she’d returned from Mexico, before she officially resigned from the FBI. She’d felt compelled to tell him the truth (not the whole truth, but the procession of events, at any rate) and, predictably, he had lost it.

“You really thought they were gonna do this nicely, play by the book? These guys – from the start, you could tell they thought the law doesn’t apply to them. I told you not to go into those tunnels and you went anyway. Are you happy now? How could you not see this coming?”

_But—_she wants to say. _But—_The fogged-up faces in the plastic bags that she thinks about every time she sees her own reflection in the bathroom mirror after a shower. _But—_The gentle sway of headless bodies in the wind._ But—_“What you saw was Alejandro restoring that order.”

Tears trickle down her cheek and across her nose. The only sound audible in her little cocoon is the shuddery intake of her breath.

“They tricked you,” says Reggie’s voice, “and you walked right into it. I’ll bet you felt real special, didn’t you? Playing with the big boys. Congratulations. Now look at you.” Here his voice breaks. “I’ve never seen you like this.”

She knew like what. She hadn’t been able to rinse the taste of dirt out of her mouth; Matt’s knee seemed to have left a dent in her back; Ted’s fingers had left a necklace of bruises around her throat. But the real bruises, she felt, were just below the skin, where Alejandro’s fingers had touched her face. The markings were visible if you knew where to look.

_But—_The warm hand on her shoulder. _But—_The brush of fingertips. _But—_ “Thank you, Kate. Really.”

Reggie. The only person she could talk to about these things, and she’d shut him out. Yet she knows even he couldn’t have protected her from herself, from the unconscious desires welling up in her, clouding her judgment like footsteps on a muddy river bottom. She couldn’t admit then that he’d been right; that her desire to see justice done had blinded her against the warning signs until she was in too deep. A human pawn, no different from the hostages that used to be her main line of work. How easily the roles were reversed once she’d left all that was familiar to her and entered _his _world. They might as well have tied her up and thrown her in the back of a trunk for all that she was able to do there where greed, bloodlust, and revenge reigned supreme. A piece of bait to bring out the wolves.

The place had followed her, as had the house with the bodies in Chandler, as do most of the places she visited as an FBI agent. Her head has become a photo album filled with snapshots from America’s underbelly. As her tears flow, she asks herself, _Why do you always feel the need to bear witness?_ _When will you be saturated with suffering? When will you stop lying to yourself about it being the right thing to do? _Perhaps, she thinks now, she hadn’t even _wanted _to know what she was getting into. It had been easy to pretend that she still believed at least in the semblance of a dichotomy of right and wrong when she became sheriff, though she knew by then that she was just one actor in the drama that was American foreign policy. What she did, and whether it was right or wrong, depended only on who was giving her stage directions.

She’d toyed with the idea of calling Reggie yesterday, but decided against it in the end. She knew what he’d have told her: that she hadn’t done her job, should have seen the signs from the start, had let her weakness guide her. She had, of course. She let Alejandro go. Distracted by the touch of his fingers, wanting to get him as far away from her as possible for fear of what she might do.

Her regret and guilt bring on another outburst of tears, which she staves off by biting down on the blanket. The dry taste of fabric in her mouth makes her gag.

Eventually, her painful, parched throat sends her out of bed and to the kitchen, where she gulps down a glass of water so greedily it gives her a coughing fit. Exhausted, her chest hurting, she sinks down on a kitchen chair, and buries her face in her hands. Breathing deeply, she tries to focus on the steady thrumming of her old refrigerator.

_But—_

Her phone buzzes, startling her. With bleary eyes she looks at the bright screen showing a private number. For the briefest second, she believes in serendipity—maybe it’s Reggie calling, asking how she is. She picks up.

“Sheriff Macer,” she croaks.

“Whoa, Kate, you got a hangover or something? Didn’t figure you for a party girl.”

She hears the creak of leather, imagines him putting his flip-flops up on his desk as he leans back in his chair.

“How you been?”

Stupid—the sound of a familiar voice, even Matt’s, makes her blink away sudden tears. She clears her throat.

“Hi. No, just a cold. What’s going on?”

“I’m just calling to see if you have any idea about the whereabouts of our mutual friend.”

“Alejandro?” Her breath hitches. “Why? What’s going on?”

“Well, as I’m sure you know, he was picked up from your police station two days ago, together with the girl. Only… not by me.”

There’s the faint buzz of static as she tries to process this.

“By who then?”

“We don’t know. Carina had a tracker in her shoe, that’s how we were able to locate her, but Alejandro…” He sighs. “No trace.”

“Oh.” She doesn’t know what else to say. Should she tell him about the man in the black hoodie? But then she’d have to admit that she took Alejandro to hospital, and that she—they—

_Not telling him would only raise suspicion. _Matt listens to her, occasionally hm’ing to indicate he’s still following her, apparently without reading anything into her descriptions.

“Alright. Yeah, that must’ve been one of them. That was a good thing you did, Kate.” She smiles wryly. _Good. Bad. Whatever._

“We’re gonna keep looking. Let me know if you have any news. Bye now.”

“Bye,” she says, but he’s hung up already.

Alejandro is missing. Dead? _Impossible_, is her first thought—_I would know. _He’s had to flee, but he _is_ alive. The thought is resilient, unalterable; if it was otherwise, she’d have a sense of it. The knowledge would come like an explosion, a collision wrapping her in it—it would fell her. Until then there’s hope.

_Hope? For what?_

Carina is with Matt, then. Not that that makes her feel much better. If she’d kept Alejandro in custody, would any of this have happened? Or would she just have made herself and her officers into a target for whoever’s chasing Alejandro?

Was it the right thing to do?

Signing the agreement was the right thing. Moving to a small town was the right thing. Keeping mum, letting it all fester inside her, was the right thing.

The microwave clock shows 7 a.m. She gets ready for work.

**III**

The sun is setting as she drives into the parking lot next to her apartment block. The lone streetlight that oversees it has already flicked on. An early bat cuts through the triangle of yellow light as the last rays drop behind the horizon, leaving behind a smell like a burning wire. 

After she steps out of the car, she stops dead in her tracks. Something’s off—she can feel it. Her hand moves towards her gun holster as she turns, scanning the deep blue shadows cast by the row of trees on the right edge. Her eye is caught by a bright green station wagon parked close to the trees. She’s never seen it before—surely she’d remember it. Keeping a safe distance, she walks towards and then around the car. The windows on the right-hand side, invisible from the parking lot, are all either shattered or splattered with blood.

She debates turning round and going back to the station, or calling for reinforcements. Black hoodie must’ve passed it on that she and Alejandro know each other; they’d hardly been subtle about it. Then again, she reflects, would they really leave such an obvious clue as a beaten-up getaway car? _If they wanted me dead, I would be dead already._

She flicks off the safety on her gun as she walks up the stairs, her breath shaky but her hands steady. The lock on her door has been clumsily forced, as if in a hurry. She pushes it open and enters silently, _following house-raid protocol in my own damn house_, until she reaches the living room, flicks on the light, and screams.

The body on the couch, which at first she takes to be dead, stirs at the sound of her voice, and she sees that it’s him.

“Jesus Christ!” She takes a step towards him. He’s on his back, his face a mask of caked sand and coagulated blood; she can barely distinguish the glimmer of his eyes. Her heart pounding, a surprising wave of relief makes her break into a smile.

“You’re alive,” she breathes. “They told me you were missing.” He moves his lips; she leans closer. “Water,” he whispers. She goes into the kitchen, putting her gun back into its holster, and pours him a glass. She squats down next to him and helps him drink it. The Texan night has fallen like a curtain, and the bare bulb she hasn’t bothered buying a lamp for turns the world outside into a block of obsidian, reflecting her interior. She keeps an eye on it, but sees nothing else move—he’s alone then.

“Now’s your chance, Kate.” Reggie’s voice—not an echo of the past this time. “Arrest him. Question him. Turn him in. It’ll be the one good thing you’ve done in this whole unholy mess. The right thing.”

_Get out of my head! _she wants to scream.

Alejandro lowers his head back down and licks his lips, his tongue startlingly pink. He turns to look at her, and there it is again: that look, so tender it seems stolen from somewhere deep inside him; the one that, when she first saw it in her bathroom after she’d nearly been strangled, she knew she’d do anything to earn again. He wouldn’t have given it to Reggie, under the same circumstances; she doubts he’d give it to Matt. The look that makes her wish desperately she could still just think of him as a wolf.

But it doesn’t matter what she wants—what matters is that he is here, flesh and blood, on her couch. 

“Keep still. Tell me where you’re hurt.” He doesn't reply, but turns his disfigured face away; in humiliation, she expects. She takes his chin in her hand and carefully turns his head, examining the wounds. A feverish heat radiates from him; she runs her hands over his shoulders, his arms, his chest, applying gentle pressure, feeling the lump where his stab wound has been bandaged; when she comes to his ribs he exhales sharply. _Cracked. _His knees are scraped and bloody, but otherwise unscathed. She stands up.

“I’m gonna take you to the hospital. You’ll be alright, but you’ll need stitches for those,” she taps her cheek, "and probably antibiotics." _How can he ever go back to being a spook_, she thinks as she helps him up and out of her apartment, _when those wounds eventually heal and he’s gonna look like the fucking Joker? _He appears to be thinking the same thing. During the drive, he keeps his face turned away from her; there is something stubborn about his silence, as though he feels unclean, disgusting to himself.

While waiting for a red light, she glances over at him, reaches for his shoulder and squeezes it gently. He moves his head to look at her.

“Just checking if you’re still conscious,” she says.

His eyes drift closed again, and he murmurs something. She leans towards him.

“What?”

“You need better locks on your door.”

“What I need is people who don’t break into my house if they want to see me.” She glances at him; he’s wearing a small smile, and she senses he has ceased to feel embarrassed. She starts at the clamour of a car horn behind her, and pulls up hurriedly to catch the green light.

Thankfully there’s a different nurse on duty than on the night he got stabbed. Kate makes up a story about Alejandro being one of her police officers caught in a firefight during an undercover operation, an excuse that always seems to shut people up.

“And have you any idea what exactly happened to him?” the nurse asks, looking up from his clipboard.

Kate shakes her head. “I found him like this.”

“Right. We’ll need to get him cleaned up and examined to see if he needs surgery, and run a range of tests. We’ll have more news for you in an hour or two. That okay?”

She nods, and watches the nurse wheel Alejandro down the hall as she lowers herself into a chair. Her stomach growls, and she thinks longingly of the Chinese takeout in her fridge she’s been looking forward to all day. It occurs to her Alejandro won’t have any clean clothes to wear when he gets out of here. There’s a mall across from the hospital that’s open late, and she buys him a pair of pants and a shirt she thinks will fit him. _Sheep’s clothing for the wolf_. She buys herself a sandwich.

She’s leafing through a magazine when the nurse comes to see her.

“He’s doing okay,” he informs her. “We’ve stitched up his wounds and cleaned him up. Are you okay to take him home?”

She nods, and holds out the bag. “Can you give him these to put on?”

“Will do. He’ll be out soon.”

She paces up and down until he emerges, limping slightly, but still looking a hell of a lot better than he did before. He looks at her, steadily now, wearing a look she now recognizes as humbled. He doesn’t say anything, so she turns around and walks back to the car, with him following behind.

“Feeling better?” she asks him as he shuts the door of the passenger seat. He nods.

“Thanks for the clothes.” He speaks with a drowsy burr that she might find seductive if she didn’t know for sure it was due to the painkillers.

“You’re welcome.”

They drive on for a while in silence, until Kate dares ask the question that’s been burning on her lips.

“Why come to me? Why not go straight to the hospital? Or to Matt?”

“Because I knew you’d help me. Like you did last time.”

She lets out a dry laugh. The logical conclusion of a prosecutor, following a calculated assessment of human behaviour. “You hardly gave me a choice.”

“Oh… but you had one.” It’s strange hearing him talk like this, the words trickling out unevenly like water from a broken tap. She feels his eyes on her, and her knuckles whiten on the wheel. He’s right, of course, and so was Reggie. She could have kept him in a jail cell on a number of lawful pretenses, but in the end, she had let him go just to give him the chance to come back to her. ("You used yourself as bait.")

Choosing a casual tone, she says, “It would have taken a lot of time to gather evidence to build a case for your arrest, which we can’t spare at the moment.” It’s the flimsiest of excuses, and she can hear his sardonic smile when he says, “Okay.”

After a pause, he murmurs, “Didn’t have any men’s clothes lying around, huh? Not even from an ex-boyfriend or something.” His tone is more familiar now, and she realizes she finds it oddly comforting to listen to him speak. She wouldn’t call it reassuring—she doesn’t trust him nearly enough for that—but still, his voice reminds her of who she used to be, when she felt much stronger than she does now. It gives her back a sense of resolve.

“No”, she says. “I haven’t been dating much.” She can’t resist a barb at his expense. “I find it difficult to trust men these days.”

“I can understand that”, he says. “After what this Ted guy did to you.”

_After what _you _did to me, _she wants to say, but something keeps her from voicing her thoughts_._ It's his beaten-up, bloody face, frightful now to match his deeds; yet the loss of his most humanizing attribute does not make him scarier.

In fact, it makes her feel more warmly towards him even than she did two days ago. 

“Thanks, anyway.”

“You’re welcome.” She keeps her eyes on the road.

**IV**

She throws a blanket over the soiled couch and Alejandro sits down with a grateful huff. She ambles around the room, idly rubbing her arms, avoiding his gaze while he settles down. When she turns around he is lying on his side, his eyes closed.

“You want any food?”

He shakes his head. “’m going to sleep,” he murmurs.

“Okay. Give me a shout if you need anything.”

His nod is barely perceptible. Relieved, she ducks into the kitchen and takes her food out of the fridge. She sits down at the kitchen table, pokes a fork into her orange chicken, and tries to get her thoughts in order.

She should call Matt—that’s the first thing to do. Let him know where Alejandro is so he can come and pick him up, and she can close the door on this whole thing before she finds herself unwittingly in another hurricane eye. She used to think of Alejandro as someone who held the power to warp reality at his convenience. Restoring order—and how had that worked out for him? Even if it hadn’t just been a coverup for his personal vendetta, did they actually think their outside interference would have worked?

Ever since the stabbing, the thought has been nagging her, ever more insistently, that the events in Juarez were not simply a scandal that she happened to witness. It was just the tip of the iceberg, used to cover up decades of erratic flareups in the cartels as a direct result of American interference. The illusion that the cartels can be haltered, which people like Matt are desperately trying to uphold—that evil can be uncovered and justice obtained—she sees it now, crystal clear. But then there are people like Alejandro, moving on the sidelines with their own stake in the conflict. Matt—and by extension the government—appears to be happy to let Alejandro do his thing, so long as it’s US enemies he kills.

She covers her face. She feels like she’s losing her mind; she doesn’t know what to believe any more. It feels as though she’s walked onto a crossroads, been blindfolded and spun around a couple of times, then told to find her way back to where she came from. Land is just land, she tells herself, mapped out and compartmentalized, one tiny part of which is hers to oversee. And yet she can’t stop thinking of how it _felt _as they passed the Mexican border that day, the hairs on her arms standing up as if they had driven over a ley line or something; a feeling that anything could happen, as indeed it had.

Land is never just land. There’s always something underneath—tunnel systems for breeding, escaping, hibernating; basements filled with supplies, junk, corpses; intricate webs of cables and pipes that control what happens on the surface. Just like with people.

Was it his real face, then, the one she’d seen under the TL-lights of the emergency room? It had seemed as real as it would get—a look of nakedness that had nothing to do with his stripped torso. She thinks about Carina’s clinging to him, her own intuitive sense of his protectiveness. _You can’t fake stuff like that, right? You can’t fake trustworthiness, vulnerability._ She shivers, gets up, and starts making herself a cup of coffee.

“Hey.” She jumps, so lost in thought that she hasn’t heard him get up from the couch. He’s standing in the doorway, leaning heavily against the doorpost. 

“Hey,” she says, glancing at him, then turning back to the coffee machine, putting in a new filter and grabbing the can of powdered coffee. “You want anything?”

“Water.” He moves towards the sink. Kate takes a glass from the drying rack, fills it up with water. She hands it to him.

“Here. Sit down.” He takes the seat across from her own, empties the glass in one swig and sets it down on the table. Automatically, Kate grabs it and fills it again—the thought of sitting across from him and looking him in the face suddenly fills her with dread. At the police station it was different, surrounded by her colleagues, the safety net of uniforms and protocols.

She pretends to be busy measuring the coffee crystals and heaps them into the filter. “How are you feeling?” she asks, her back still towards him as she turns on the tap to fill the water reservoir, too far this time—the water sprays out with a violent hiss that makes her jump. She turns down the pressure, wipes the droplets from her arms with a towel, and pours the water into the coffee maker, hyper-aware of every movement she makes.

“Better. Think the painkillers are wearing off.” She turns around, leaning against the counter, and watches him drink thirstily.

It’s surreal to be alone with him like this, as if he’s a friend who’s come round for a drink. She studies him closely, and feels something soften in her chest at the sight of his beaten-up face and the white bandages on his cheeks. Strange to think that this is only the second time they’ve been alone together, _really _alone. A year ago, that was still the stuff of her nightmares. She’d long expected him to show up at her home again, but not like this. Images are replicating furiously in her head, corridors opening, vistas shifting and re-configuring. His crushing weight on her body, teeth gleaming and bloody, a gun under her chin—that, _that _was real, at least. The rest—

He places the glass back on the table with a thud, and it jolts her out of her reverie.

_Time for some answers._

“The green car. Is it yours?”

The refrigerator drones; he glances at it. The sound she’s grown so used to is suddenly pervasive, filling her ears like a swarm of bees.

He shakes his head. “No. But I stole it to get here. It was sitting by the side of the road with three bodies in it.”

“And how did you know my address?” she asks him. He gives her a look that says _Come on, now._

She turns around, realizing she’s forgotten to turn on the machine. She flicks the switch, and the familiar gurgling and dripping fills the room. More noise. _The worse to hear you with._

“Who was she, really? Why was she with you?”

He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”

Kate throws up her hands. “You think all women should be kept in the dark, is that it? Meddlesome, irrational creatures that we are?”

“We wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t gone down the wrong tunnel,” he says, sharply. “If you hadn’t followed me, I wouldn’t have had to shoot you. Meddlesome, irrational? In this case, yes.”

“I don’t like being played for a fool, Alejandro! Not again!”

“That’s not what this is.” His voice is low, calculated, the way she knows it; if infuriates her, this monotone that automatically conveys truth and justice, virtues that she automatically loses whenever she raises her voice.

“Kate—it’s not like Juarez. I genuinely needed your help.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you needed me, alright—as your nurse.” Tears she’s been holding back for three days rise to the surface. He watches her while she furiously wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. For a moment she's sure she managed to fool him, two nights ago, by playing the part that got her to Juarez, that made her such an asset to the FBI: professional, fair-minded, never whining if she got hurt, never claiming a woman's exemption from anything unpleasant. She'd felt proud afterwards of how well she'd kept it together. She darts a look at him, and he makes a gesture as if to reach out to touch her. Nope. He sees right through her. She turns away, and stares at the brown drops leaking into the coffee pot.

“You know,” she says, her voice ragged, “you don’t even know anything about me. At all. Just what you—you’ve—assumed about me.”

“And vice versa.”

“Oh, I know all about you and your dead family.” The words fly out before she can stop them; she closes her eyes in irritation. _Should not have said that._

“Do you?” The chair creaks; he leans back. “Do tell. Where was I born? Where did I grow up? Where did my wife and I go for dinner on our first date?”

She bites her lip and stays silent. The coffee machine winds down; she takes her time pouring out a cup. Her cheeks burn. _Stupid._

“You think I am a monster,” he says, with a touch of amusement. “The monster under your bed, perhaps.” She pauses, the coffee pot still in her hand.

“You should be careful before you go around calling people monsters, Kate,” he says behind her. “It is never so black and white.”

He’s right, and she knows it. But she’s never been one to depart lightly from any rules and conventions that are authoritative to her, including ideas of what make someone human. She turns around. He is shaking his head, looking down at his lap. “You Americans,” he says, sounding resigned. “You think that everything can be divided into right and wrong. Winners and losers. Love and hate. You never learn, do you? There is only circumstance, and survival of the fittest.” He sighs. “I told you then it wouldn’t make sense to your American ears.”

“Made sense to Matt, though.”

“Matt loves his country,” Alejandro concedes. “And he knows its government doesn’t practice what it preaches. But he’s not afraid to play dirty to make it seem that way on the surface—because he knows the value of that image.”

Kate smiles grimly. _And you will question everything that we do. Correct. _“You also told me I’d understand everything in the end,” she fires back. She wraps both her hands around the hot cup, forcing herself to feel the heat searing her palms. “But I didn’t. I understood nothing. I began to question everything—myself, my job, Matt, Reggie, you…”

“And you blame me for all this?” His soft voice gains an edge. “It’s not my fault you lost faith in your precious American constitution, your values of freedom. _You _signed up for it. You followed Matt’s orders just like I did. It’s time you learnt there’s no such thing as freedom.”

Yes, she knows. Freedom from nightmares. Freedom from men in her head telling her what to do. Freedom from him…

Something begins to dawn on her. She folds her arms and scrutinizes him, and suddenly, she sees it. How he has hollowed her out—not completely, but just enough to fit inside and fill her up, as if she’s an empty space, taking the place of the people she has cut out of her life.

The moment when his story began to bleed into hers was not when she saved his life, nor when he saved hers. It was on the plane, when he nodded off and let his guard down around her, and let her share in his fear. When he woke up with a gasp, eyes unfocused, looking at her but still trained upon the horrific vision he’d woken up from, she’d seen his quiet euphoria—_it was just a dream—_and then the anguish, layers of memories colliding, splintering and re-configuring. She’d felt caught out then, but in retrospect, that’s when the seed of her sympathy for him was planted, despite everything that followed.

“I do, actually. Blame you.” It’s not an accusation. Her fear has dissipated; she suddenly feels more calm and clear-headed than she’s done in months. Slowly putting her thoughts in order, she continues, “I did think you were a monster. That you had singled me out, corrupted me. It took me a long time to stop beating myself up over _how _that happened, and start asking _why_.”

She takes the last sip of her coffee, then sets down the cup on the counter with more force than usual. His face is open, almost innocently so.

“Maybe you’d like having a safe house to crash next time you get shot up in my neighbourhood. Your own private nurse.”

She takes a step forward, her arms still folded.

“Maybe I _do _remind you of your daughter, and you want to protect me, even though you’re only putting me in more danger. Or maybe…” She pulls up her chair, sits down and lays her arms on the table, leaning forward, looking directly at him.

“Maybe it was something else.”

Something darkens in his eyes; she feels the moment hinge, her skin growing hot. Here, again is the tension between them that she’s felt from day one, this desire not just for physical contact but an emotional bond that has shown itself so potent, so cataclysmic so far that she doesn’t doubt it can make everything come hurtling off its axis.

“I think you wanted me to be like you,” she says, softly. “To have suffered. To share your secrets. Because you’re lonely, and you don’t know where else to turn.”

His eyes flicker, and for a second she’s afraid he might lose his temper. _Do it, _her eyes tell him. She needs this; for so long she's anticipated the moment when the veneer would be split open and his desires would surge to the fore, composure thrown to the wall. She wants the uncensored, uncut version, she wants to feel what it was to be in him, to be him, to live temporarily behind his eyes, just as he’s lived behind hers for the past two years.

“I wasn’t the one who picked you for the operation.”

“I know. But you made me central to it, just the same.”

For the first time, he deliberately looks away from her, at his lap. There is a long pause. Then he says something she doesn’t expect.

“When I was there, in the desert, after they’d shot me… I saw you.”

Her mouth drops open. “What?”

“I could see myself lying on the desert floor. There was nobody around for miles… then you appeared beside me.” He looks at her intently. “That’s when I knew I should go to you for help. Again.” 

She’s stunned. “You had a near death experience?”

“Well, I nearly died,” he says, drily, “so I suppose you’d call it that.”

“I thought that meant you saw angels. Or like, light at the end of the tunnel. Didn’t you see your family?”

After a pause, he says, “I did.”

_His wife, his daughter, and me—what a trio._

“And what did I do?”

“You were holding my hand.”

“And what did _they _do?”

He looks away from her and at his own hand, resting on the table. He turns his palm upwards, as if the answer is written there.

“That’s private,” he says, finally.

She wants to ask him what he's not telling her, what she can only guess at; what it was like lying there, powerless, drifting in and out of the darkness upon sensations he could neither prevent nor control. Which visions he saw. What she looked like in them. She knows it's useless to prod him for a detailed description; his eyes say it all. _You came for me. _

“Okay.” She stands up to turn the coffee machine off, then leans back against the counter and folds her arms. “Guess that makes me your guardian angel, huh?”

He answers her sarcasm with a tiny smile, but his eyes, when he looks at her, are mournful, full of that melancholy song, the lonely howl in the night that something inside her can’t help but answer to.

It wasn’t just a logical decision, then, for him to come to her.

“You lied to me.”

He nods.

“I didn’t see any other way.”

She believes him. To unlearn the strategies that have helped you survive thus far is no mean feat. The things he’s seen defy understanding, would make you think twice about getting close to another person, would make you think _if that is a human, I choose not to be human, I choose to be something else._

She looks at his eyes as he looks away from her; he’s indulging her, she realizes, giving her time to contemplate his words, and she’s grateful for it. Either that, or it’ll be too much to look back at her directly; she feels briefly triumphant, and overcome with the urge to take his hand. You can only go on so long with the feeling of being unrelated to anything, not mattering to anyone—she can’t imagine how he’s borne it all these years. Now, he matters to her.

“Tell me about her. Your daughter.”

She expects him to mention her age, her lovely face, how good she was at drawing. His eyes still averted, he says:

“I’ve never loved anyone as much as her. Haven’t since. I was there at her birth. And when she was killed, it was…” He trails off, looking lost, fumbling for words to describe the things he so rarely speaks about. Then he sighs, and continues, “…more than any person could comprehend. Everything fell apart. Things _looked _different. Food didn’t taste the same. I felt like I was losing my mind.”

She waits. He’s resting one wounded cheek on his hand; his eyes are half-closed, little more than slits now.

“Matt likes to say he made me.” He smiles wryly. “He didn’t. He just found me. He gave me a place where I could exorcise my anger.”

“Or else?”

“I would have killed myself.” Now he looks her straight in the eye. “When it happened, all I wanted was for it to have been me. I wanted to die. The pain… it kept me in its orbit. Stopped me from looking into the future. I couldn’t escape it. I thought taking revenge would make it go away.”

She realizes she’s holding her breath, and exhales. He looks away from her again. 

“I hate this country,” he says, a bitter tinge to his usual laconic tone. “The land of opportunity. The endless appetite of it. I fell for it, too. I allowed Matt to persuade me that my appetite for revenge could be satisfied, but I didn’t realise how it works for you Americans—nothing will ever be enough for you. You will never have enough wars, enough weapons, enough territory, enough enemies. The more I killed, the more my thirst for revenge grew… the more was needed to satisfy it. When I was in the hospital, I realised this. There will never be an end to it unless I put a stop to it.”

“How will you do that?” He shrugs.

“I was emotionally numb for the longest time,” he says. “It was just easier. Now… It’s difficult. Carina is the same age she would have been. There were moments where I looked at her and thought… it was her.”

He looks at her, and she realizes he’s counting on her help; a wolf welcoming, waiting, begging for the knife to dispatch him. But he’s drawn her into the orbit with him, chosen to be tender with her, tender and soft and foolish, _so foolish _as to come back for her, to her. All he’s done is deprive himself of the resources which might serve to extricate him. Revenge couldn’t save him; nor could Carina; nor can she. 

She’s split in half like a tree in a storm. On one hand, she wants to say, _I’ll take it. I’ll take the love you had for her, and I’ll keep it safe in the empty space inside me. _On the other, she wants to shake him and scream how unfair it all is, the fear, the trauma, the exile, the loneliness; the things he introduced her to for his own selfish ends, so her world would revolve around him alone.

She pushes herself away from the kitchen counter. His eyes, which held her face until now, now take in the rest of her body—grey T-shirt and jeans, her usual uniform—then glide back up to meet hers again. He looks hungry, almost hedonistic; it’s the face of a man who wants desperately to indulge himself but knows he shouldn’t, who up till now has been resolved never to let on how much he longed for anything. Her anger morphs into something else heated, not desire exactly—more like hunger: the recognition of a weak point she can prey upon. When he looks at her, _really _looks at her, it sends a thrill down her spine. To be wanted, and to want in return—has anyone ever been able to resist that feeling?

But looking and eating are different things. It’s the American way—through vice, depravity and crime, to attempt to eat what one can only look at. A voracious kind of love; never content to let what you think is beautiful and worth protecting be, but, in your desire, devour it whole so no one else can get at it. He’s learnt that from living in the US, at least.

She circles the table, slowly, deliberately; stands before him and lays her hands on his cheeks, feeling the scratchy white bandages underneath her palms where the pain that has made him has finally broken through to the surface. As she runs her fingers over his unlovely face, it seems to her she is touching the Mexican hinterland itself, its furrows and lacerations; terra incognita, and equally unreadable. Underground, a network of tunnels, an infrastructure of desire, running counter to what is presented on the surface; hidden, seething, threatening to take over.

He lays his hands on her hips, lets them travel down to cup her buttocks and skim the backs of her thighs, never taking his eyes off her face. She reads want in the umber of his eyes, feels a shiver of desire scuttle across her own skin and raise the hairs on the back of her neck.

“Say now if you want this to stop,” he murmurs. “You’ve got more to lose than me.”

He waits. The refrigerator whistles and groans like a large, somnolent animal.

She has to laugh. That would be the sensible thing to do, and yet. She says, “There’s nothing more to lose.” She lowers her head, and kisses him.

At first they kiss for comfort, softly, almost gratefully, burning off the pain and misery of the past few days. He’s breathing quickly and shallowly through his cracked ribs. She runs her tongue first along his teeth, then the stitches, tasting blood; the intensity of their kiss increases. She knows he must have watched her making out with Ted, having followed her home from the bar; the idea excites her, even as she realises he waited until the very last moment to interrupt the struggle for her life. She bites down on his lower lip. He emits a low groan, from pleasure or physical pain, she can’t tell, and pulls her into his lap with one hand on her neck, crushing their mouths together. She grinds in his lap as his hands run down her back and then back up, palms pressed against the side of her neck, his fingers stroking the sensitive spot behind her ears so that she shivers. _He could strangle me right now, _she thinks. At the same time, clear as anything, she knows that she’s not in danger here.

Images flash through her mind of hands around her throat, his face coming slowly into view. She’s dreamt of this moment for years, in both lunchbreak daydreams and feverish nightmares. Then, the moment was always girded by his wolfish grin, _what big teeth you have, _gleaming in the dark, _all the better to eat you with, _followed by a frenzied tearing and scratching, the overwhelming need to devour each other. Punishing him for what he’s done to her, and at the same time eating her way to the core of him, finding out _why _he’d singled her out, _why me, what have I done to deserve this? _She’s paid back her debt to him four times over, if she counts his vision in the desert, when for so long all she wanted was to destroy him for what he did to her, make him pay. But it all seems so far away now, inconsequential to this moment, here in her kitchen, where they can finally be themselves, neither wolf, nor lamb, nor human, but something else entirely. 

The heat radiating from him, the taste of him, the way his fingers clutch at her exposes all her nightmares and fantasies for the phantoms they are. This is not a wolf; this is a man who has given up on redemption and the things that are irrevocably lost, but who finds he can no longer deny himself and watches, gratefully, the grace that comes shambling in after he’s lowered his defenses. What he has done is unforgivable, but he's done more to punish himself than she even could. _It is not always so black and white. _How many times must he have called himself a monster before accepting his own adage?

He breaks the kiss, abruptly, and she's afraid he will push her away and tell her to _stop,_ _it isn't right_, but he only changes position in the chair so that his ribs are under less pressure.

“Does it hurt?” she whispers.

He grimaces, and nods, but fastens his hands on her hips when she makes as if to stand up.

“I can bear it,” he says. His eyes rove over her face, and she blushes at the intensity of his gaze. “It hurts less already.”

They kiss again, but more slowly this time; he runs his fingers up and down her spine. His mouth leaves hers and moves to her cheek, her ear, her neck. It seems to her that he means to undo the violence he has done to her body, each kiss an apology for the ways in which he has been overtaken by himself; how it should be he who suffers, not she.

He lingers, nuzzling her neck, and she rests her chin on top of his head, her eyes closed. She feels his breath hot against her throat.

“What are we doing?” she whispers.

He murmurs something she doesn't catch.

They sit there, wrapped in each other’s arms, for a long while. She watches the red figures on the microwave morph into one another as she strokes the bristles at the back of his neck, feeling calmer than she has in a long time. She feels his head nodding until it drops to rest against the bottom of her throat, his breathing becoming steady and a little deeper.

She gently unravels herself from his embrace, at which point he wakes up again and blinks at her confusedly.

“I need to sleep,” he says.

She nods and stretches, faking a yawn. “Yeah. I’m exhausted, too.”

She follows him into the living room, watching him as he crawls under the blanket.

“Alejandro?” It feels as if she’s speaking his name for the first time.

He blinks up at her. “What is it?”

Something has been nagging at her. She's established her position, firmly in the grey beside him; but she still doesn’t see how they can move forward. For a moment, she debates not saying anything, but her newfound courage propels her to do it anyway.

“If we—if you come back, I want you to promise me … that you’ll stop this. Stop trying to find the people that killed your family.” Her heart is in her throat again, but she knows she is safe now, with him.

“That you’ll make some kind of effort to _let this go._ Please. Because it’s not fair to me.” She feels her bottom lip start to tremble, and clenches her fist to force down the next flood of tears. Hopefully, almost desperately, she looks him in the eye. He watches her, and after a long moment, he says, “I can’t make that kind of promise, Kate. I wish I could.” And he looks as if he sincerely _did _wish it.

She nods. Disappointed, she tears her gaze away from his and stares at the ground.

“I won’t ask again,” she says, not sure if she means it as a threat or as a reassurance. He hums to indicate he’s understood.

She’s dying for a cigarette. “Good night, then,” she says, taking one last look at him.

“Night,” he says, and winks with one sleepy eye. He’s almost passed out.

She goes into her bedroom and opens her window. The cold desert air gives her goosebumps all over, but she shivers with pleasure, receives it like a balm on her flushed skin. She finds a still half-full carton on her nightstand and lights up, then blows out the smoke as she leans out of the window. 

A slice of moon hangs over the nightly tableau: the dark, glistening humps of the cars in the lot like enormous beetles; the streetlight cutting a yellow circle out of the darkness; the squat houses with their curtained windows. A lone car whizzes down the highway in the distance, followed shortly by another.

Leaning on the windowsill with one elbow, her chin in her hand, she drags on her cigarette. How many of them are headed for Mexico, she wonders. How many of them contain just ordinary people, going back and forth to see their families? How many of them are the guerillas fighting this unofficial war, simply because they’ve got nothing to lose?

She rubs her eyes. _Maybe I should move to New York or something. Leave everything behind. I could make a fresh start._

Except there is actually something to be left behind this time.

She finishes her cigarette and crawls into bed. Desire still slumbers in the pit of her stomach after their kiss, and she starts to rub herself, but finds she can’t push herself to an orgasm. She falls asleep anyway.

**V**

“What big eyes you have.”

“All the better to see you with.”

He sips his wine, but curiously enough, it leaves his mouth stained dark-red; when he smiles, his teeth are red, too. She looks down into her own glass; the wine is much more syrupy than she’d previously noticed. She takes a sip, and it’s not wine at all—it’s blood.

She runs her tongue over her lips, smearing the blood across her mouth. She gulps her glass down in one, throws it on the ground, and steps closer to him.

“What big teeth you have.”

“All the better to eat you with.” His eyes gleam in the firelight; she sees his jaw begin to slaver. She bursts out laughing, laughs at him full in the face; she is nobody’s meat. She begins undoing the buttons of his shirt. Later, she sleeps between the paws of the tender wolf.

**VI**

When she wakes up, her first thought is of him. She slips into her bathrobe and goes into the living room. Unsurprisingly, the couch is empty, and she can’t help but feel her heart sink a little.

She goes into the kitchen to make herself some coffee. Her orange chicken sits forgotten on the table. There’s a post-it note on the coffeemaker. She plucks it off, and reads:

_Wait for me._

_A_

She exhales slowly as she stares down at the words. She sees them for what they are: a promise, but more binding, more forceful than any promise that's been made to her, including by her ex-husband.

After her divorce, she stopped categorizing the world into things or people she could love. To like, to want, to desire—all that she was still capable of. But this is unlike anything she's ever known. It wears a terrible gentle face, mangled and misshapen, and it’s strange, so _strange_, without boundaries to give shape and meaning to anything. She remembers thinking what it would be like to go with him. To survive in the darkness, surely you must either become your own light, or wear the dark near as skin. Which will it be for me, she wonders. How dark will it get?

She might as well wait--she's waited so long already. Dreading, dreaming, but waiting all the same. The kind of patience Alejandro has, biding his time all these years, she cannot fathom; yet she understands its consequences, the traces it leaves on the famished face of a man who has starved himself for years. 

Yes, she will wait. She’s always been good at following orders.

**Author's Note:**

> Surprise - a sequel!
> 
> I wanted to put in song lyrics by Beck because I found out Benicio Del Toro listened to that album, Morning Phase, while on set for Sicario - very interesting, no? 
> 
> Please comment if you enjoyed!


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